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Here is a compilation of essays on the ‘Philosophy of Post-Modernism’ for class 9, 10, 11 and 12. Find paragraphs, long and short essays on the ‘Philosophy of Post-Modernism’ especially written for school and college students.
Essay on Post-Modernism
Essay Contents:
- Essay on the Origin of Post-Modernism
- Essay on the Definition of Post-Modernism
- Essay on the Conditions of Post-Modernism
- Essay on Modernism and Post-Modernism
- Essay on the Main Features of Post-Modernism
- Essay on Feminism and Post-Modernism
- Essay on the Problems of Post-Modernism
Essay # 1. Origin of Post-Modernism:
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The term post-modernism originated among artists and critics in New York in the 1960s and was taken up by European theorists in the 1970s. One of them, Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984), who is considered to have pioneered the word postmodernism attacked the legitimating myths of the modern age (the grand narratives), the progressive liberation of humanity through science, and the idea that philosophy can restore unity to learning and develop universally valid knowledge for humanity.
Post-modern theory became identified with the critique of universal knowledge and foundationalism. According to Lyotard (1984), ‘We can no longer talk about a totalizing idea of reason for there is no reason, only reasons.’
Among the central features associated with post-modernism in the arts are:
i. The deletion of the boundary between the art and everyday life;
ii. The collapse of the hierarchical distinction between elite and popular culture;
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iii. A stylistic eclecticism and mixing of codes.
There is parody, pastiche, irony and playfulness. Many people, however, stress that post-modernists espouse a model which emphasizes not depth but surface. They are highly critical of structuralism and Marxism and are antagonistic to any theory that ‘goes beyond’ the manifest to the latent. The decline of the originality and genius view of the artistic producer has been replaced by the assumption that art can only be repetitious.
It is often said that in post-modernism there is:
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i. A shift of emphasis from content to form or style;
ii. A transformation of reality into images;
iii. The fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents. There have been continual references to eclecticism, reflexivity, self-referentiality, quotation, artifice, randomness, anarchy, fragmentation, pastiche and allegory.
With the development of post-modernism in recent years, there has been a move to ‘textualize’ everything – geography, history, philosophy, jurisprudence, sociology and other disciplines are treated as so many optional ‘kinds of writing’ or discourses.
Post-modernism characterises scepticism towards the grand claims and grand theory of modern era and their claims to intellectual superiority. It (as compared to modernism) stresses and emphasises openness to range of options in social enquiry, artistic experimentation and political empowerment. Post-modernism represents and manifests a response to modernism as a homogenising form and to its totalising theoreticism.
Instead, postmodernism lays emphasis on discontinuities and disjunctures characteristic of everyday life in real world. The homogeneity in the built-up landscape of the era of ‘organized capitalism’ is contrasted with the heterogeneity of economic, social and political life in the current phase of ‘disorganized capitalism’. To some people, post-modernism may be regarded as a culture of late capitalism that appeared to have initiated an integral part of the new phase of post- Fordist flexible accumulation.
Essay # 2. Definition of Post-Modernism:
Post-modernism is a short-hand for a heterogeneous movement which had its origin in architecture and literary theory. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Geography, the term ‘post-modernism’ refers to ‘an architectural style which is a composite of past styles, characterized by a variety of colours, stylistic details from many periods and what is claimed to be a return to a vernacular type…. It is a philosophical stance which claims that it is impossible to make grand statements—meta narratives—about the structures of society or about historic causation because everything we perceive, express and interpret is influenced by our gender, class and culture….No interpretation is superior to another.
It has brought to geographers recognition that space, place and scale are social constructs, not external givens…. Some geographers claim that post-modernism challenges the dominance of time and history in social theories and instead stresses the significance of geography and spatiality’.
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Postmodernism, therefore, raises urgent questions about place, space and landscape in the production of social life. ‘Post-modernism’, says Gregory (1989), ‘is in its fundamentals a critique of what is usually called the “Enlightenment Project”.
Post-modernism may be said to represent a radical attack upon the mimetic theory of representation and search for truth. It is anti- foundational in that it explicitly rejects totalising ambitions of modern social science. Such an epistemology, if taken seriously, is inescapable and radically relativist.
Now, let us begin by looking briefly at the following ‘family’ of terms – Modernity and Post- modernity, Modernization, Modernism and Post-modernism. These terms/words are often used in confusing and interchangeable ways. To understand the philosophy of post-modernism in the context of geography, particularly, and social sciences, in general, it is essential and necessary also to know the exactness of the terms and words, and the distinction between them.
Essay # 3. Conditions of Post-Modernism:
Many people are aware that western societies since the Second World War have radically changed their nature in some way. A fashionable description of such societies is that they are post-modern. Post-modernism is in part a description of a new type of society, but also, in part, a new term for post-structuralism in the arts.
During the past 50 years, the leading sciences and technologies have become increasingly concerned with language – theories of linguistics, problems of communication and cybernetics, computers and their languages, problems of translation, information storage and data banks.
The technological transformations are having a considerable impact on knowledge. The miniaturisation and commercialisation of machines are already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available and exploited.
According to Lyotard (1984), the nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation. The status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the post-modern age. He, however, predicts that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable into quantities of information will be abandoned and the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of the eventual results being translatable into computer language.
The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is in-dissociable from the training of minds, or even of individuals, is becoming obsolete. Knowledge is already ceasing to be an end in itself. It is and will be produced in order to be sold.
It is widely accepted that computerised knowledge has become the principal ‘force of production’ over the last few decades. This has already had a noticeable effect on the composition of the work-force of the most highly developed countries.
Knowledge will be the major component in the world-wide competition for power, and it is conceivable that nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled for control over territories in the past.
In the postmodern age, science will probably strengthen its pre-eminence in the arsenal of productive capacities of the nation-states and the gap between developed and developing countries will grow even wider. Lyotard (1984) suggests that power and knowledge are simply two aspects of the same question – who decides what knowledge is? Who knows what needs to be decided?’
To post-modernists, knowledge is a question of competence that goes beyond the simple determination and application of the criterion of truth, extending to the determination of criteria of efficiency (technical qualification), of justice and/ or happiness (ethical wisdom), of beauty (auditory or visual sensibility), etc.
Knowledge is what makes someone capable of forming not only ‘good’ denotative utterances, but also ‘good’ prescriptive and ‘good’ evaluate utterances. But how are they to be assessed? They are judged to be good if they conform to the relevant criteria (of justice, beauty, truth and efficiency) accepted in the social circle of knower’s interlocutors.
Narrative Knowledge and Scientific Knowledge:
Scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in competition and conflict with another kind of knowledge, called ‘Narrative’. Narratives (popular stories, myths, legends and tales) bestow legitimacy upon social institutions, or represent positive or negative models of integration into established institutions. Narratives determine criteria of competence and/ or illustrate how they are to be applied. What is transmitted through these narratives is the set of rules that constitute the social bond.
The main difference between scientific knowledge and narrative knowledge is that scientific knowledge requires that one language game, denotation, be retained and all others be excluded. ‘Both science and non-scientific (narrative) knowledge are equally necessary. Both are composed of sets of statements; the statements are ‘moves’ made by the players within the framework of generally applicable rules’.
It is therefore impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge or vice versa – the relevant criteria are different. Narrative knowledge certifies itself without having recourse to argumentation and proof.
However, scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all. In short, there is a recurrence of the narrative in the scientific.
However, (older) master narratives no longer function in contemporary society. The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation. The decline of the unifying and legitimating power of the grand narrative of speculation and emancipation can be seen as an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies since the Second World War, which has shifted emphasis from the ‘end’ of action to its ‘means’.
The Mercantilisation of Knowledge:
As a result of the Industrial Revolution, science became a force of production, a moment in the circulation of capital. An important aspect of research is the production of proof which requires to be proven. A scientific observation depends on facts being registered by sense organs.
But the range and power of discrimination are limited. Technical devices follow the principle of optimal performance, maximising output and input. The game of science becomes the game of the rich, in which whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being right. It is thus that an equation between wealth, efficiency and truth is established.
The goal of science in another way is no longer truth, but performativity, i.e. the best possible input/ output equation. Since performativity increases the ability to produce proof, it also increases the ability to be right; the technical criterion cannot fail to influence the truth criterion.
The utility of knowledge, therefore, appears to be more important than the search for truth. The shift of attention from ‘ends of action to its means’, from ‘truth to performativity’, is reflected in present-day educational policy and the emphasis is, therefore, on skills rather than on ideals.
It is only in the context of the grand narratives of legitimation—the life of the spirit and/or emancipation of humanity—that the partial replacement of teachers by machines seem inadequate or even intolerable.
According to Lyotard (1984), ‘it is probable that these narratives are already no longer the principal driving force behind interest in acquiring knowledge. In the context of mercantilization of knowledge, more often than not this question is equivalent to – is it saleable? And in the context of power-growth – is it efficient?’ Education, as it seems clear, must provide not only for the reproduction of skills, but also for students’ progress.
What is vitally important is the capacity to actualise the relevant data for solving a problem here and now, and to organise the data into an efficient strategy. Data banks are the encyclopaedia of tomorrow; they are ‘nature for post-modern men and women’.
What is, therefore, important is to arrange the data in a new way. It is imagination, i.e. capacity to articulate, which allows one either to make a new move (a new argument) with the established rules or to invent new rules, i.e. a new game.
It is a historical fact that countless scientists have seen their invention and/or discovery of new rules ignored or repressed, sometimes for decades, because that invention and/or discovery too abruptly destabilised the accepted position, not in the scientific hierarchy, but also in the discipline. The more striking the invention, the more likely it is to be denied, precisely because it changes the rules of the game upon which consensus was based.
Essay # 4. Modernism and Post-Modernism:
It is commonly believed by many that with the cessation of the Second World War, a new type of society began to emerge. The society was labeled in various ways, depending on the way it was analysed – consumer society, post-industrial society, society of the spectacle, post-modern society, etc. Post- structuralists, on the whole, argue that the new society is now out-dated, and as such, it does not and cannot apply to the new social developments.
This argument often overlaps with one another concerning modernism and post-modernism. The crucial question in these debates is – Has the Enlightenment Project failed? Should we, like the post-structuralists and post-modernists, declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause? Or should we seek to hold on the intentions and aims of the Enlightenment and of cultural modernism?
The project of modernity formulated in the eighteenth century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment consisted in their efforts to develop objective science; universal morality and law and autonomous art. Contemporary philosophers wanted to use this accumulation of specialised culture for the enrichment of everyday life.
They hoped that the arts and sciences would promote not only the control of natural forces, but also understanding of the world and of the self, moral progress, the justice of institutions and even the happiness of human beings.
But what has happened is in marked contrast to the hopes and ideals of the Enlightenment. Gradually each domain has been institutionalised; science, morality and art have become autonomous domains separated from the life-world. The structures of cognitive-instrumental, of moral-practical and aesthetic-expressive rationality have come under the control of special experts.
In America, France and elsewhere, cultural modernism is now under attack from many different quarters. More recently, the Enlightenment Project has been denounced by the French ‘new philosophers’, such as Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard and their contemporary English and American counterparts. It has also been attacked by the post-structuralists, whose works, however, require being included among the manifestations of post-modernism.
‘The concept of post-modernism is ambiguous and is not yet widely understood. It has probably emerged as a specific reaction against the established form of high modernism. For some thinkers, post-modernism is a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new features in culture. The concept seems to be connected with the appearance, between the 1950s and the 1960s, of a new social and economic order. Sometimes a useful distinction is made between pre-modernists, those who want to withdraw to a position anterior to modernity, anti-modernists and post modernists. There are so many similarities between post-structuralist theories and post-modern practices that it is difficult to make a clear distinction between them’.
Essay # 5. Main Features of Post-Modernism:
To understand post-modernism, it is necessary to know what Lyotard (1984) means by the term ‘Modern’. He uses the term modern ‘to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a meta discourse—making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of rational or working subject or creation of wealth’, or to put it in another way – ‘Societies which anchor the discourses of truth and justice in the great historical and scientific narratives (recites) can be called modern.’
Post-modernists distrust meta-narratives; there is a deep suspicion of Hegel, Marx and any form of universal philosophy. The post-modern condition is one in which the ‘grand’s recites’ of modernity—the dialectic of spirit, the emancipation of the worker, the accumulation of wealth, the classless society —have all lost credibility. A discourse is defined as modern when it appeals to one or another of these ‘grand’s recites’ for its legitimacy.
The ‘grand’s recites’ are master narratives—narratives of mastery, of man seeking his ‘telos’ in the conquest of nature. The Marxist master narrative is only one version among many of a modern narrative of mastery. The advent of post-modernity signals a crisis in a narrative’s legitimising function, its ability to compel consumers.
Lyotard is critical of Marxism because it seeks to create a homogeneous society which can only be brought about through the use of cbercion. He believes that the individualistic fragmented society that we have today is to stay. Yet, he seems to be nostalgic for a pre-modern (traditional) society, for traditional societies stress narratives, that is to say, myth, magic, folk wisdom and other attempts at explanation. According to him, there is a conflict between narrative and science (theoretical knowledge). Narrative is disappearing and there is nothing to replace it with.
Lyotard, as it is often said, argues that art, morality and science (the beautiful, the good and the true) have become separated and autonomous. A characteristic of the contemporary time is the fragmentation of language games. There is no meta-language. No one can grasp what is going on in society as a whole.
Lyotard seems to be saying that there is no one system of domination. There are parallels between these ideas and some right- wing theorists (like Hegel) who argue that society works much better in terms of micro-events; a society that is left to market forces is better than a consciously planned society.
The argument of some post-modernists and post-structuralists, in short, is that big stories are bad, but little stories are good. Instead of a truth/falsity distinction they, including Lyotard, prefer a small/ grand narrative criterion.
Grand narratives have become associated with a political programme or party, while little narratives are associated with localised creativity. These ideas are similar to those of Foucault, who was also against grand narratives and supported the idea of local struggles.
Fredric Jameson (1984) has identified two significant features of post-modernism – ‘pastiche’ and ‘schizophrenia’. He explains that the great modernisms were predicted on the invention of a personal, private style. The modernist aesthetic was organically linked to the conception of an authentic self and a private identity which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unmistakable style. The post-structuralists argue against this; in their view the concept of the unique individual and the theoretical basis of individualism are ideological.
Not only is the bourgeois individual subject a thing of the past, it is also a myth, it never really existed in the first place; it was just a mystification. And so, in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible all that is left is ‘pastiche’. The practice of ‘pastiche’, the imitation of dead styles, can be seen in the ‘nostalgia film’. We have lost our ability to locate ourselves historically. As a society we have become incapable of dealing with time.
Post-modernism has a peculiar notion of time. Jameson (1991) seeks to explain what he means in terms of Lacan’s theory of schizophrenia. The originality of Lacan’s thought in this area is to have considered schizophrenia as a language disorder.
It emerges from the failure of the infant to enter fully into the realm of speech and language. The experience of temporality, human time, past, present, memory, the persistence of personal identity is an effect of language.
It is because language has a past and a future, because the sentence moves in time, that we can have what seems to us a concrete or lived experience of time. The schizophrenic, in short, experiences a fragmentation of time, a series of perpetual presents. Jameson (1991) contends that experiences of temporal discontinuity, similar to those maintained above, are evoked in postmodernist works.
However, Derek Gregory (1989) has also identified three basic features of post-modernism in geographic perspective. First, ‘post-modernism is, in very real sense, ‘post-paradigm’, that is to say, post-modern writers are immensely suspicious of any attempt to construct a system of thought which claims to be complete and comprehensive. In geography, of course, there has been no end of attempts of this kind, and many of those who have mistakenly made use of Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm have done so prescriptively.
They have claimed the authority of ‘positivism’, ‘structuralism’ and ‘humanism’ or whatever as a means of legislating for the proper conduct of geographical inquiry and of excluding work which lies beyond the competence of these various systems. Others have preferred to transcend these, to them partial, perspectives and to offer some more general (meta-theoretical) framework in which all these competing claims are supposed to be reconciled.
For over a decade this was usually assumed to be of some kind of systems approach and now, apparently, it is the philosophy of realism (perhaps coupled with some version of Habermas’s critical theory) which holds out a similar promise. But post-modernism rejects all of these manoeuvres.
‘… post-modern writers are hostile to the ‘totalizing’ ambition of the conventional social sciences. Their critique points in two directions. First, they reject the notion that social life displays what could be called a global coherence, that our day-to-day social practices are moments in the reproduction of a self-sustaining social system whose fundamental, so to speak ‘structural’ imperatives necessarily regulate our everyday lives in some automatic, pre-set fashion. The post-modern writers do not, of course, deny the importance of the independencies which have become such a common-place of the late twentieth-century world…. But they do object to the concept of totality which informs much of modern social theory because it tacitly assumes that social life somehow adds up to … a coherent system with its own subordinate logic’.
‘Second….these writers reject the notion that social life can be explained in terms of some ‘deeper’ structure. This was out of the premises of structuralism … it still surfaces in some of the cruder versions of realism. It is largely through this opposition that post-modernism is sometimes identified with post-structuralism…. The postmodern critique will seem to echo the complaints of those who saw in structuralism a displacement of the human subject. In human geography, as elsewhere, many commentators were dismayed by the way in which various versions of structuralism replaced the concrete complexities of human agency by the disembodied transformation of abstract structures. But post-modernism is not humanism. It objects to structuralism because its sharpened concept of structure points towards a ‘centre’ around which social life revolves … but it objects to humanism for the very same reason’.
‘Thirdly, the accent on ‘difference’ which dominates the preceding paragraphs is a ‘leit motif’ of post-modernism. One of the distinguishing features of post-modern culture is its sensitivity to heterogeneity, particularity and uniqueness. To some readers, this insistence on ‘difference’ will raise the spectre of the idiographic, which is supposed to have been laid once and for all (in geography at any rate) by Hartshorne-Schaefer in the 1950s and by the consolidation of a generalizing spatial science during the 1960s’.
‘Several commentators have emphasized deep- seated continuities between the Hartshonian orthodoxy and the prospectus of the so-called ‘New geography’. But Schaefer’s clarion call for geography as a nomothetic science, compelled to produce morphological laws and to disclose the fundamental geometries of spatial patterns, undoubtedly sounded a retreat from aerial differentiation which was heard in many quarters. Specificity became eccentricity, and the new conceptual apparatus made no secret of its confinement – it was, variously, a ‘residual’, background ‘noise’ to be ‘filtered out’, a ‘deviation’ from the ‘normal’….In the 1980s other writers in other fields gave specificity a wider resonance’.
‘In philosophy, Lyotard claims that ‘postmodern knowledge … refines our sensitivity to ‘differences’ in social theory De cartean wants to fashion ‘a science of singularity …that ‘links everyday pursuits to particular circumstances’ and in anthropology Geertz parades “the diversity of things” and seeks illumination from the light of local knowledge.’
In geography there has been a remarkable return to aerial differentiation. But it is a return with a difference. When Harvey speaks of the ‘uneven development’ of capitalism … or when Hagerstrand talks about ‘pockets of local order’, they and others like them are attempting much more than the recovery of geography’s traditional project. For they herald not so much the reconstruction of modern geography as its deconstruction… what Soja calls the ‘post- modernization of geography’.
Totality or Fragmentation:
Lyotard (1984) repudiates and contradicts the big stories, the meta-narratives of Hegel and Marx. He believes that no one can grasp what is going on in a society as a ‘whole’. Rejecting totality, Lyotard and other post-modernists stress fragmentation—of language games, of time, of the human subject, of society itself. One of the fascinating things about the rejection of organic unity and the espousal of the fragmentary is that this belief was also held by historic avante-garde (artistic) movements. They also sought for the dissolution of unity. In their activities, the coherence and autonomy of the work was deliberately called into question or even methodically destroyed.
Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘allegory’ has been used as an aid to understanding avant-gardiste (non-organic) works of art. Allegory is essentially a fragment, the opposite of the organic symbol. Benjamin has described how the allegorist pulls an element out of the totality of the life context, isolating it, depriving it of its function. An allegorist is believed to join several isolated fragments, and thereby creates meaning.
Montage presupposes fragmentation of reality; it breaks through the appearance of totality and calls attention to the fact that it is made up of reality fragments in the organic work of art, the material is treated as a whole, while in the avant-gardiste work the material is torn out of the life totality and isolated. The aesthetic avant-gardist fragment challenges people to make it an integrated part of their reality and to relate it to their experience.
Sarup has identified three features of postmodernist thought. First, there is a tendency to reduce all truth-claims to the land of rhetorics, narrative strategies or Foucauldian discourses conceived as existing solely by virtue of the differences between them so that no single claimant can assert itself at the expense of any other.
Second, there is often an appeal to the Wittgenstenian notion of ‘language games’ (sometimes called ‘forms of life’). A belief in heterogeneous language games, each involving a different set of cognitive, historical or ethno- political criteria, implies that it is not possible to decide between rival interpretations.
Third, there is a turn towards the Kantian sublime as a means of devaluing cognitive truth-claims and elevating the notion of the unrepresented to absolute pride of place in the ethical realm. In other words, there has been a move to aestheticise politics by removing ethical and political questions as far as possible from the realm of truth and falsehood.
Lyotard, however, adopts a Wittgenstein (1958) language games approach to knowledge proposing that we conceive of various discourses as language games with their own rules, structure and moves. Different language games are thus governed by different criteria and rules, and none is privileged. Language games are indeed the social bond which bonds society together.
Lyotard characterises social interaction primarily in terms of making a move in a game, playing a role and taking a part in various discrete language games. Lyotards (1984) model of a post-modern society is one in which one struggles within various language games in an agonistic environment characterised by diversity and conflict.
According to Norris (1992), what results from Lyotard’s post-modern interpretation of the Kantian sublime, is an outlook of extreme cognitive scepticism, along with a politics completely cut off from questions of real-world relevance and accountability.
Essay # 6. Feminism and Post-Modernism:
Few women have participated and engaged in modernism and post-modernism debate and they have very little to say about post-modernism. However, Morris (1988) has argued that since feminism has acted as one of the enabling conditions of discourse about post-modernism, it is therefore, appropriate to use feminist work to frame discussion of post-modernism.
Feminism and post-modernism have emerged as two most important politico-cultural currents of the last decade. Both, feminism and postmodernism have offered deep and far-reaching criticisms of philosophy, and of the relation of philosophy to the larger culture. Both have tried to develop new paradigms of social criticism which do not rely on traditional philosophical underpinnings.
There are also differences between feminism and post-modernism. Post-modernists offer sophisticated criticisms of foundationalism and essentialism, but their conceptions of social criticism tend to be anaemic. Feminists offer robust conceptions of social criticism, but they tend to lapse into foundationalism and essentialism.
Female post-modernists, like Linda Nicholson and Nancy Linda (1988) have suggested that each of these tendencies has much to learn from the other; each is in possession of valuable resources which can help remedy the deficiencies of the other. Lyotard (1984) offers a post-modern conception of what he calls the ‘social bond’.
What holds the social bond is a weave of criss-crossing threads of discursive practices, no single one of which runs continuously throughout the whole. Individuals are the nodes where such practices intersect and, so, they participate in many simultaneously.
It follows that social identities are complex and heterogeneous. They cannot be mapped on to one another or on to the social totality. Indeed, strictly speaking, there is no social totality and there is no possibility of a totalising social theory.
Feminists, like post-modernists, have sought to develop new paradigms of social criticism which do not rely on traditional philosophical underpinnings. Political imperatives, however, have led some feminists to adopt modes of theorising which resemble the sorts of philosophical meta- narratives criticised by post-modernists.
In short, post-modern feminist theory would be pragmatic, and tailor its methods and categories to speak to the specific task at hand. Both, Fraser and Nicholson (1988), however, contend that there is decreasing interest in grand social theories on the one hand, and essentialist vestiges persist in the continued use of ahistorical categories without reflection as to how, when and why such categories originated and were modified over time, on the other hand. They suggest that this tension is symptomatically expressed in the work of French psychoanalytic feminists and believe that Kristena and others personally deny essentialism even as they performativity enact it.
Essay # 7. Problems of Post-Modernism:
Post-modern is not without problems and criticisms. Lyotard, who pioneered post-modernism, is often confronted with some criticisms. His book The Post-modern Condition (1984) is on one level about the status of science and technology, about technocracy and the control of information.
But on another level, it is a thinly veiled polemic against Habermas, who stands for a ‘totalizing’ and ‘dialectic’ tradition. Habermas thinks that the totality of life has become splintered and argues that the cognitive, ethical and political discourses should come close together. He wants, in fact, to defend modernity against the neo-conservative post-modernists. Post-modernist’s main target is the Hegelian-Marxist concept of totality.
Post-modernists believe in the breaking up of the narratives without describing how and why this theoretical collapse has taken place and why they are themselves polemicising against these discourses. There are many kinds of grand narratives, but post-modernists tend to bring all of them together.
Even if some of the narratives of legitimation are dubious, why reject all grand narratives? Many post-modernists fail to specify what causes the rupture in society and history that produces the post-modern conditions. Theorists who reject master narratives, or historical, periodising social theory, are naturally going to have difficulty producing such a narrative, and thus find themselves in an a poretic situation.
Post-modernists reject totalising social theories, the master narratives, because they believe that these theories and narratives are reductionist and simplistic, but, nevertheless, they offer a theory of post-modern condition that presupposes dramatic break from modernity.
But surely the concept of post-modernism presupposes a master narrative, a totalising perspective. While post-modernists resist grand narratives, it is impossible to discern how one can have a theory of post-modernism without one.
Post-modernists insist that the field of the social is heterogeneous and non-totalisable. As a result, they rule out the sort of critical social theory which employs general categories like gender, race and class. From their perspective, such categories are too reductive of the complexity of social identities to be useful. In short, there is no place in postmodernists’ universe for critique of relations of dominance and subordination along lines like gender, race and class.
In their view, there is nothing to be gained in the critical analysis of large-scale institutions and social structures. They contend that sociological and geographical synthesis must be abandoned for playful deconstruction and the privileging of the aesthetic mode.